Monday, December 2, 2013
State and Local Stories
Agenda for the 1:30 p.m., Dec. 5 meeting of the FOIA Councilincludes preview of some FOIA bills that likely will be filed for 2014.
An Onancock man who represented himself in two Freedom of Information cases filed against the town has been awarded a statewide honor for his work. Charles Landis, 79, was named the Virginia Coalition for Open Government’s 2013 citizen award winner. He is one of four open government award winners who will be honored at the organization’s annual conference Dec. 6 in Williamsburg. “I was completely shocked … There’s some very good company right there,” said Landis of his fellow honorees, who include Washington Post reporters Laura Vozzella and Rosalind Helderman, who used public records to unearth Gov. Bob McDonnell’s gift scandal, and Fairfax County Clerk of Court John Frey, who has made county court opinions available to the public without charge.
Delmarva Now
Virginia has garnered a lot of unwanted attention in the past several months as the butt of jokes about the seemingly wide-open relationship between politicians and anyone who wants to give them gifts or money. Are Virginia’s laws too lenient? Is the Virginia Way still a viable way to do the public’s business, or has it lost its luster? What measures of reform are out there, and will they change anything? You can hear these and other questions discussed at the annual conference of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government on Friday at the Williamsburg Community Building, 401 N. Boundary St.
Times-Dispatch
Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career regularly inserting phony numbers in Department of Defense accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she said, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and fellow DFAS accountants set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s – a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies. And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford said, staff members were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” – in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called plugs, to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.
Virginian-Pilot
A surprise encounter with a government agent at an academic conference helped Charles W. Sydnor Jr. find the focus that would become the foundation in his already rich life. Three decades later, the Virginia Holocaust Museum is benefiting from his labors. The well-traveled Sydnor is donating to the museum a trove of historical documents he began collecting after that meeting, and he has plans to use that collection as a building block that could turn the Richmond institution into a global destination for Nazi research.
News Virginian
Google has selected Chantilly as the 2013 “eCity” of Virginia. The Google eCity Award recognizes the strongest online business community, or digital capital, in each state. The businesses within this community are using the Web to find new customers, maintain contact with existing customers and help fuel the local economies, county officials said in announcing the selection.
Sun Gazette
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